


it's a long way forward (so trust in me)

by piggy09



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-12
Updated: 2016-11-12
Packaged: 2018-08-30 15:17:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8538034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: Helena and the Hendrixes, living in the woods.





	

**Author's Note:**

> [warnings: animal death, evisceration, gore; reference to suicide; reference to drug abuse; reference to torture; reference to abuse]
> 
> This fic dedicated to the online hunting community. Thanks for putting so many helpful, thorough tutorials online. (Also, if you hunt and any of this knowledge is incorrect, please tell me! I will edit.)

Alison’s footsteps are very loud in the snow. To be fair: Helena’s footsteps are also very loud. But she is carrying her babies in her stomach, and Alison is carrying nothing except her nervousness and her fidgets – and Helena does not think that those weigh very much at all. Crunch crunch crunch go Alison’s feet through the ice and snow.

“Are the traps – close?” she says, voice high and thin as it flutters between the trees. If it was a bird Helena could catch it, easy, and break its neck. But it’s a human voice, and she doesn’t do that anymore.

“Not really,” she says. The silence falls on them again like snow. The sound of Alison fidgeting is very very loud. Helena sighs. “If they are close the animals will not come, because they smell us, and then they will be too afraid to come into the traps.”

“Ah,” Alison says, sounding satisfied. Helena hums to herself as she walks, so that the silence doesn’t get heavy again. _She_ likes it. She thinks maybe Alison does not like it, much.

There: the trap. There: the rabbit. The snare has caught around its belly, and it is struggling desperately; its skin has ripped open, and bits of fur are scattered in the snow. It meets Helena’s eyes, and its own eyes are two black holes like wells for drowning in. It looks terrified. Helena understands.

“ _Oh_ Lord,” Alison says, and when Helena turns around Alison’s hand is over her mouth. Alison’s eyes dart to Helena’s. “Are you going to – kill it?”

“Yes,” Helena says, bending down in the snow next to it. She gets to her knees slowly, holds the rabbit’s neck in her hand. Even through her thick glove she can feel the beat-beat-beating of its heart. When this happens – and it happens, from time to time – Helena can feel the world shifting around her; something about a life in her hand, the warmth of the rabbit in the cold of the snow. She feels alive. Not in a way like winning, but in a way like remembering: _oh. I am here. I am alive_.

With Alison here the balance of it becomes different. She feels embarrassed. She feels like she is doing something dirty and shameful that nobody else should see.

Helena settles the heel of her hand under the rabbit’s chin and pushes it back. The rabbit’s eyes meet her eyes the whole time. Back, back, back—

Snap.

* * *

The rabbitmeat hisses in the pan over the oven (“I don’t think it’s really an oven, Helena,” Donnie says hesitantly, and Helena just hums and keeps stirring the oatmeal and) (this is her place and she built it and she named it and an oven keeps you warm and it’s where you make the food and) ( _skovoroda z ruchkoyu_ , _plytoyu_ , _metal nad vohnem_ , these are all words, but Donnie-and-Alison frown at her when she speaks Ukrainian syllables like rocks in her mouth and so she says _oven_ ) ( _oven_ , Donnie, please understand) as Alison cooks it. Helena sits next to her and watches the meat turn brown. Alison had put spices in the pan and they make it smell like something-besides-meat, which is good because it makes Alison more likely to eat it. Helena likes meat even if it only tastes like meat. Alison doesn’t.

“Thank you for cooking,” she says quietly.

“Well!” Alison says. “You did make us all that stew. What sort of guest would I be if I didn’t help out sometimes?”

She blinks rapidly, looks up from the pan. “I’m sorry, Helena,” she says. “I didn’t mean – well – you know! We certainly weren’t expecting you to—”

“I know,” Helena says. She bites on the inside of her lip, rolls it back and forth between her teeth. There is something mean twisting around in her throat and in her chest and she doesn’t want to say anything in case it crawls out of her mouth and vomits bitterness. She doesn’t like being bitter. It makes her very tired.

“The meat is burning,” she says. It is, but only a little bit. Not a problem. Alison says _oh!_ anyways and hurries to take it off the oven, put it onto a plate. Helena lets her pull out the knife and cut it into three, neat, easy. She folds her arms over her belly and just thinks about it, the way when Alison holds a knife she can cut meat into precise little pieces and when Helena holds a knife Alison flinches. She doesn’t want to think about what that thought means, so she just holds it.

“I think it needs more salt,” Alison says worriedly as she bites into her part of the rabbit. She keeps shooting Helena nervous little looks, little flinches, small fidgets. Helena wants to grab her wrists and make her hold still – but she knows that would just make everything worse.

She takes a bite. It tastes so good. She doesn’t know what to say – she doesn’t know if telling Alison that it’s good is the right answer. So she just holds the chunk of meat in her mouth, tastes the way it no longer tastes like anything that has ever been alive.

* * *

She likes having them here. The Hendrixes, in her home, she does, she likes it. It’s nice to not be alone.

* * *

It’s just—

* * *

Donnie and Alison are whispering to each other in the dark at the other end of the hut and Helena is so awake, the most awake she has ever been. She is listening very hard to her own breathing so that she doesn’t listen to what the two of them are talking about. She was in their bedroom, once! She knows that they are used to having their big bed to sleep in, and dream in, and hold each other in. They are not used to Helena sleeping there too, close enough to touch. They think she’s asleep. Probably. They probably think she’s asleep.

_Sometimes I worry—_

_I know they’re fine, but—_

_What sort of mother—_

Underneath Helena’s skin there is an itching. She wants to get up and pull on her boots and walk through the snow until the inside of her head is snow and white and woods-quiet. She used to do that. Before Alison and Donnie came to stay. Sometimes she would have bad dreams, and she would get up in the middle of the night and _go_. Instead of doing that she puts her hands over her ears and curls in tighter, knees jabbing against the round taut skin of her belly. She can’t help herself: she thinks about Sarah.

After Helena met Sarah, but before she knew that Sarah was Sarah, she would sleep in her nests and kick the covers behind her so that they made the weight of another body. She didn’t know the stranger with her face that well, not well enough to know the rhythm of her breathing, but the soft sketch of her there in the dark was enough to help Helena fall asleep.

After Helena knew Sarah was Sarah and also her sister she did the same thing, but guiltily. She couldn’t stop herself from feeling bad about it – but that didn’t stop her from dreaming Sarah’s hand through her hair, over and over again. _It’s okay. I’m right here, Helena. We’re safe. You can sleep now_. Sarah pressing her lips to Helena’s forehead, the way Helena has heard that mothers sometimes do. Helena being safe. Helena falling asleep alone and waking up alone and the ghost of Sarah fading in the morning light and—

She doesn’t do it anymore. When she got to Alison’s house, she stopped doing it. It seemed silly. Helena’s heart was moving itself around to find places for her other sisters; to do that, it had to take Sarah off the shelf and press her like clay into a smaller shape. All of Helena’s sisters became something like equal, and – Cosima holding her like that would have been wrong, and Alison holding her like that would have been wrong, and so she let herself forget about Sarah.

Now she closes her eyes very tight in the dark and shifts around until the furs and the blankets and the pillows and her backpack are all a wall against her back. Another person would feel like this, maybe: cold and full of strange angles. Helena relaxes, just a little bit.

 _We can’t stay here forever,_ Alison says. _We can’t keep hiding._

 _Shh_ , Sarah says. _Shh shh shh. You don’t have to worry. I’m not leaving. Go to sleep_.

* * *

“Can you teach me?” Alison says.

Helena pauses in tugging the bowstring over the end of the bow, looks at Alison. Alison is sitting folded up very neatly, shivering with something expectant. When Helena learned to fire a gun she cried, and—

“If you want to learn,” she says, and shrugs a little bit. “But only on trees. And sticks. And snow. Not on animals.”

“Why not?” Alison says. “I can help! You’re going to – catch cold, always wandering around in the snow, and your _babies_ —”

“ _I_ know,” Helena snaps, “what is good for my babies.” Anger growls in her and then she hits it and then she’s terrified, and her anger is terrified, and then she is mostly just guilty and hollow and scared. “Sorry,” she mutters. She shifts her hand off the bow so she can tap one finger against her lips, _shh_. “No shouting.”

“I’m sorry too,” Alison sighs. “I just—” she lets out a small, embarrassed laugh. “I feel so _useless_ , sitting here! I want to help.”

“Sometimes,” Helena says, trying to sound light, “it is good to not have use.” She looks up, catches Alison’s eyes like – like – like something that can be caught. She tilts her head. “But. If you want to learn, I will teach. With smaller bow.”

“I can use the big one,” Alison says stubbornly.

“With what muscles?” Helena says.

Alison stares at her; her chin juts a little bit. “Beth taught me how to fire a gun,” she says. “She said I was the best student that she’d ever had! I can use your bow, Helena.”

 _Beth?_ Helena thinks, and then: _Elizabeth_ , and then: _Elizabeth Childs_ , and Beth’s hands on the gun shooting Maggie and Beth’s hands on the gun showing Alison how to shoot and she wonders if Alison understands that tangle, how if you use your hands for one thing and then another thing the second will always have traces of the first. She wonders how much Alison knows about ghosts.

Not as much as Helena knows. Once you kill someone, that never ever goes away. What does Alison know, about that sort of stain?

* * *

Helena isn’t very good at teaching. She’s never had to before, not really, and so she knows that something about the way Alison is standing should be _different_ but she doesn’t know what it is, or how it should be. She just sucks her lips between her teeth and watches Alison fire in every direction but the lump of snow with branches stuck in it. (Antlers.) (Or. Close enough.)

“Cheese and _rice!_ ” Alison spits, stomping one foot against the ground. “Why is this so difficult?!”

“Your feet,” Helena says, the second she realizes it. The fidgets, the shakes. That’s it. “You have to be planted, like a tree. When you move, your branches move, and the arrow – goes away.”

She wanders away from Alison, picks up an arrow that lodged somewhere in the snow. Alison takes this chance to lower the bow and shake out her arms. Helena would say _the bow is too heavy for you_ but Alison probably knows. _She should have listened_ , whispers a mean little voice in the back of Helena’s head. _She should have listened to me_. Helena tells it to hush and goes back over to Alison. She hands her an arrow.

Alison goes back to how she was standing before and Helena says, quietly: “Can I touch you.”

“Wh—oh, yes, of course,” Alison says briskly, but she goes a little stiff. Maybe Helena shouldn’t have asked. But maybe if she hadn’t asked Alison would have gone stiffer. Touching is confusing, and people are confusing, and Alison is confusing, but firing a bow makes sense and so Helena focuses on that. She puts her hands on Alison’s shoulders and moves them. She pushes Alison’s elbow. She moves her feet.

“Beth did this,” Alison says. “I – stuck out my elbows too much, apparently.” She gives another one of those embarrassed laughs.

“Your elbows are good,” Helena says quietly. “No sticking. Only turned a little the wrong way.”

Alison stares at the pile of snow. “I miss her,” she says quietly. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this, you didn’t even _know_ her, but – she was – so brave, and now she’s gone.”

 _To Beth_ , Alison had said.

 _To Beth_ , Sarah had said, and Cosima, and everyone around the table.

 _To Sarah_ , Helena had said. _To Kira_.

“I can listen,” Helena says. “If you want to tell.”

“You know I’d do the same for you,” Alison says, but it sounds like a question. “I don’t think I know anything about you, Helena.” She’s looking at Helena now, intently, like Helena is a piece of uncooked meat or something else that Alison can solve.

 _Good_ , Helena thinks. _It’s better that you don’t._

“Okay,” she says instead. “Maybe someday.” That isn’t an answer. She catches herself doing it again: wondering if Alison knows.

“Okay,” Alison says, still giving her that same look. She turns back to the lump of snow and breathes, tenses her fingers on the string, pulls back and fires.

The arrow shoots over the snow and into the woods somewhere. It doesn’t hit anything. Helena doesn’t realize until she notices her chest aching: she’d really thought that this time it would.

* * *

There are days when Helena doesn’t have to do anything at all besides check that the meat hanging outside is drying up, and she thinks this confuses Alison-and-Donnie. Their house was always loud, always moving with soccer matches and karate practice and envelopes to lick and meals to make and busy busy go-go-go. And now the three of them are sitting in the hut, and Helena is trying to let her mind be slow and roll over her thoughts but the way the Hendrixes are vibrating makes Helena’s whole mind start buzzing and she can’t. She’s irritated with herself for sitting still. She’s irritated with them for being irritated that she is sitting still. She wants to bite something. In her stomach her babies fight each other, fists and feet and elbows.

Donnie’s hand on Alison’s thigh. The wind, whistling through the gaps, singing off the plastic bags Helena uses to try to patch the holes. She can’t get all of them. The cold always finds a way in, no matter what she does to try and keep it out.

“Walkings,” she says abruptly, standing up. She pulls on her jacket and puts on her hat and is out the door before Alison or Donnie can say something like _wait_ or _come back_. And then she’s out, and gone, and in the snow. She picks a direction and walks and listens to her breathing snuffling in and out of her nose and she doesn’t know what she’s feeling, only that she’s feeling it. It feels: bad. That’s all she knows about it.

Helena fumbles her phone out of her pocket and types in a number by memory. Ring. Ring. Ring. We’re sorry, the party you have dialed is not currently available. Please leave your message at the tone—

Helena stops by the silver-twisting-curve of the river. She’s shivering a little, and that’s mostly from the cold. The river keeps going; it just keeps on going, forever and ever amen. She doesn’t have to do anything. It’ll keep flowing even if she isn’t there to help.

In her head Sarah is here, standing next to her, and Sarah opens her mouth and says

* * *

The arrow hits the tree trunk right in the middle of the berry-juice ring Helena painted on it. Alison makes a triumphant shriek, seems seconds away from doing a silly dance. Helena is smiling too, watching the arrow wobble itself to stillness where it landed. She and Alison have been out here every day, or every few days, and here they are: dead center.

“Take that, _tree!_ ” Alison says triumphantly, and Helena snorts.

“Very good,” she says gravely. “Tell the tree who is leader.”

“Boss,” Alison says absent-mindedly.

“Boss.”

Alison goes over to the tree and yanks the arrow out, goes back to her starting point and finds her position easily. “Do you think that—” she starts, voice wavering, and then stops.

“Yes,” Helena says. Alison turns around, quickly; her ponytail whips through the air as she sends a frown in Helena’s direction. Helena can’t help herself: she smiles, just a little bit, wrinkling her lips. “Maybe,” she says. “No. Finish the question, _sestra_ Alison.”

But Alison doesn’t. She looks down at the arrow she’s holding, absentmindedly straightens the feathers on one end. “I can hit the tree, now,” she says. “I am _very_ good at hitting the tree. Maybe it’s time I…moved on?” Her eyes go up from the arrow to Helena’s eyes. _Ah_ , Helena thinks, thought like a rock dropping to the bottom of a well.

“To animals,” she says.

“Yes.”

Helena looks off to the side, feels her mouth wrinkling in a new way. A sour way. They don’t need meat, really; the traps give them little animals, plenty of them, and Helena thinks they will need maybe one more deer to make it through the rest of the winter. And then Helena can put down her bow and her knife and sleep until the snow melts and the trees start blooming green. She’s aching for it. She’s ready.

“I just _really_ want to shoot something,” Alison says, voice hopeful and vicious and also too soft to break skin.

Helena sighs through her lips, sends them flapping. “Okay,” she says. “No hunting. But. If you have the bow, and you see something in the woods…” she trails off, meets Alison’s eyes again. “You know what to do, now.”

“Yes,” Alison says. She smiles; her cheeks are pink and rosy from the cold. She looks like she’s spun from sugar. She looks so wrong out here.

* * *

We’re sorry, the party you have dialed is not currently available. Please leave—

* * *

Alison and Donnie both flinch when Helena gets her hand on the knife, and Helena is very tired. The deer in front of her makes her very tired. Not – in a bad way, really, but in a heavy colorless way like snow. She sits back on her haunches and considers the deer. It’s still warm. It would be warmer, but after Helena killed the deer Alison had made her wait until she could get Donnie and here they are.

Helena plunges the knife into the bottom of the deer and cuts up, slow, all the way up to the ribs. “You have to get rid of the big bone,” she says, “the one – here.”

“ _Oh_ god,” Donnie says.

“That’s the pelvic bone, isn’t it?” Alison says brightly. “If you’re going to throw up do it over by the tree, Donnie.”

“You can throw up anywhere,” Helena says, “and – maybe. I don’t know.” She saws the maybe-pelvic-bone until it snaps and then pulls it out, keeps sawing up towards the chest. The deer splits itself open, steams and sighs hot air. Behind her, Donnie vomits over by the tree. Helena thinks: _Alison, why did you bring him_. Helena thinks: _Alison, what is it like to pull someone by the hand and tell them_ come with me, I don’t want to be alone.

She cuts the throat-tube and carefully pulls all the guts out. She used to eat the guts too, but. That seems to be the story: _she used to – but_.

“There,” she says, watching the insides of the deer steaming in the snow. “All done.”

“So if you cut the windpipe, you can just pull it all out?” Alison says. Her voice is very high and thin and excited and Helena thinks, again, about birds.

“Mhm,” she says. “You have to yank. But then it all goes. Everything inside the deer is connected. One big knot. See?” She pushes gloved fingers through the organs in the snow, points the way the intestines connect to the stomach connects to the heart. Well – maybe the stomach doesn’t connect to the heart. But that would make the most sense, if it did.

Alison crouches down next to her, considers the guts with a slight furrow between her eyebrows. “It seems like a waste to leave them,” she says, voice wavering like a question.

“Not really,” Helena says. “Animals will eat them, and they will grow big and fat, and then we can eat them. Or the worms will eat them. And then the dirt, and then the plants, and then…” she trails off. “Any ways. We will eat them. No matter what. Somehow.”

“We could do _something_ ,” Alison says.

 _We could have eaten them_ , Helena thinks, _but you didn’t want to and now we don’t_.

* * *

Today the only sound in the hut is the clicking of Alison’s knitting needles. She’s knitting a scarf. Helena keeps thinking about knitting baby shoes, but she doesn’t know why; it’s a scrap of memory that she can’t place, something almost too bright and colorful to be real. She’s thinking about it. She is also dozing a little.

“Sometimes I think it’s my fault that she died,” Alison says, and Helena opens her eyes.

“Beth?” she says.

Alison gives a fidgety little head movement and exhales through her nose. Yes, Beth.

“How did she die,” Helena says. “No one said.”

Alison looks up from her knitting. “She jumped,” she says quietly. “In front of a train.”

“Oh,” Helena says. She imagines Beth leaping. Helena has never been on a train but she saw them speeding through the countryside of Italy and now she thinks about Beth in a bright green field, jumping and leaping and then the high fast scream of the train—

“I don’t get it,” she says. “How was it your fault?”

“I gave her pills,” Alison says, her voice getting softer and softer. “I knew she was taking too many, but I was taking too many too! I thought she would know when it was too much. That she would save the both of us from it. I thought…”

The needles start up again, sound like teeth biting down on nothing. Helena feels a horrible sour twisting in her belly: she doesn’t know how to help. She has no idea what to say; she still doesn’t understand how pills could be like a gun, how they could both lead to somebody dying.

“It wasn’t your fault,” she tries, because she’s fairly certain that it’s true. 

“But what if it was?” Alison says. Her eyes are shining, her voice is filled with water.

“Alison,” Helena says solemnly. Alison looks up at her. Her face makes Helena want to cry too – it’s just the _hope_ in it. Helena isn’t used to other people wanting her to save them, not like this. With a gun and with a knife and with a bow, yes. With words: no.

“I am knowing about fault,” she says. “Did you pull the trigger?”

“No.”

“Did you drive the train?”

“No.”

“Did you push her?”

“ _No_ , of course not, but—”

“It is _not your fault_ ,” Helena says. Her voice comes out of her throat as a vicious growl, and Alison stops talking abruptly. Her hand reaches up and touches the little gold cross at her neck. Helena is so sad she could die.

* * *

Hanging the clothing out to dry. It’s cold, and Alison-and-Donnie were cruel and took away Helena’s jacket and shirt on the grounds that the-stink-is-actually-going-to-kill-us,-Helena so Helena has to wear _three_ layers of skins instead and the skins aren’t as good. She hangs the clothing up, watches the way the water freezes on the sleeves. Shirt, shirt, shirt.

“You think Alison’s gonna catch anything out there?” Donnie asks out of nowhere.

“Yes,” Helena says. She doesn’t turn to look at him. “She is very…mm. Determined.”

“That she is,” Donnie mutters to himself. The silence comes back, walks around the both of them. Its feet leave no marks in the snow, but Helena can tell that it’s there.

“She just wants to be like you, y’know,” Donnie says.

Helena turns and gives him the full force of the look on her face. It is not a very believing look, or an impressed one. “There is no need for these lies, Donnie Hendrick,” she says. “They are silly.” She goes back to hanging up – oh, pants now. Very fun.

“I’m serious!” Donnie says. “Every time you go out there in the woods she just sits there and huffs and talks about how you’re out there baiting traps and curing meat and oh, Helena’s so smart, oh, how does she survive out here, oh, I feel like such a spoiled idiot, I wish I could help her. I haven’t seen her this mad since that potluck where Portia Grossman made those lemon bars.”

“I don’t know how to make lemon bars,” Helena says.

“Yeah, but—” Donnie sighs. “She just wants to impress you. You’re like the super cool deer-killing wilderness woman, and she wants you to think _she’s_ cool.”

“I think she is very cool,” Helena says. She’s baffled. She loves Donnie, but he is sort of an idiot; she doesn’t think he knows what he’s talking about.

“Well, you should tell her that,” Donnie says, “because I’m sick of playing middleman.” Helena pokes through his words but they don’t sound angry, just sort of amused. She lets them go.

Alison doesn’t need Helena to tell her anything, though. Alison doesn’t need Helena for anything. Alison will bring back a deer; she knows how to cut it open, now, how to save the meat. She’ll be fine. Helena can hang up the shirts for her, and wait for Alison to come home.

* * *

Donnie goes inside and it’s just Helena, poking the frozen shirts with interest to watch the way they swing back and forth, and Alison running out of the woods, and Alison covered in blood and Alison’s hands with blood and Alison saying “Helena, please, I need your help,” and Alison

not bleeding. It’s not Alison’s blood. Helena breathes in a shaky breath and then she breathes it out. “Okay,” she says, and follows Alison into the woods.

The deer is still alive. The arrow is sticking out of the meat of its shoulder and it’s screaming, hoarse and raw and not at all like a woman screaming. The sound is too low. Helena knows how screaming women sound, and the answer is not at all like this.

“Oh,” she says.

“I thought I could kill it,” Alison says, and her voice is so raw with despair and shame that Helena can’t breathe. “I thought I could, but I can’t do it.”

“It’s okay,” Helena says. She kneels down in the snow behind the deer. It’s flailing, and its head is jerking – nuzzling the snow, over and over again. _It’s not going to hold you back_ , Helena wants to tell it, but it’s just an animal and wouldn’t understand. She gets the knife. She runs her hand over its skull, between its ears.

“ _Spaty, spaty, olen_ ,” she croons, and then shoves the knife up into the back of its skull. By the spine. It jerks and thrashes and then it’s: gone. Helena keeps her hand on its head until the death leaves and she and Alison are alone. Then she lifts her hand. She pulls out the knife. She wipes it on the snow.

She looks up. The snow is starting to fall again, and it’s landing lightly in Alison’s hair; little white flakes, like tiny stars. Alison Hendrix, neat ponytail, matching hat and jacket, shiny boots, still holding the bow. Blood on the jacket. Blood on her face, just a few drops. Every time Alison is around Helena she ends up with blood on her face. Or at least it feels like that. Like it’s inevitable.

“I’m so sorry,” Alison says, voice sour and sad. “I really thought…” she trails off. “You must think I’m so weak.”

“No,” Helena says. “You took the bow. You hit the deer. I think you are very brave.”

“Beth would’ve done it,” Alison says, staring at the deer. “In a heartbeat. You would have done it. I—”

“Beth is dead,” Helena says simply. She walks close to Alison, cups her hand over Alison’s chin and cheek. She uses her thumb to wipe off the blood. “And I think you are very brave.”

She drops her hand. “But the bravest part is carrying the deer _back_ , _sestra_ Alison.”

“Oh,” Alison says. She’s blinking a little, and Helena sees the salt water on the ends of her eyelashes, and she doesn’t say anything. “Well! I can – um. It’ll be fine!”

Helena laughs, just a little bit. _Heh_. “I can help,” she says. “Take the legs. I will take the other legs. We can bring it home.”

* * *

There’s a fire in the oven, and Alison still has some packages of rice-in-a-bag left and so there is deer meat and rice. Outside it’s cold, but inside it’s warm. Donnie is telling Helena a story about when Alison was in the theatre in her college, and it’s loud enough to block the sound of the wind outside. Helena laughs at what she thinks are the right places. She eats until all the food on her plate is gone; then she eats more.

“Thank you for the food, _sestra_ Alison,” she says. “It is very good.”

“Oh, it’s nothing really,” Alison says, poking at her own food.

“It is something,” Helena says. “It is good food.” Alison looks up, and Helena looks at her and lets a smile pull up the corner of her mouth. If she acts like it’s something easy, it’ll be something easy eventually. Someday.

Alison smiles back at her, slow at first until the smile has spread across her whole face. “Well,” she says. “I’m glad you like it.”

“Helena likes anything,” Donnie says to his plate, and Alison whaps him lightly in the arm, _fwap_. They smirk at each other. Helena leans around the oven and very softly hits him in the other arm. _Pap_. Donnie hits Helena. Alison hits Helena and then they’re all very lightly hitting each other and Helena is laughing, can’t help it, sound like snow falling off tree branches, sound like new leaves unfurling and reaching towards the sun.

She doesn’t miss Sarah at all.

She doesn’t miss Sarah or Jesse or Gracie or Pupok or anyone, anyone, because Donnie is using a spoon to catapult rice at her and Alison is yelling about mess through helpless laughter and Helena is trying to pick the rice off her face with her tongue and they’re all laughing and they are: alright. They’re alright. They’re going to be just fine.

* * *

Donnie is snoring, light wheezing, and in the moonlight coming in through the cracks Helena can see Alison sit up. Her head turns towards Helena, and then it turns away and Alison’s hand reaches up and touches her chin. Helena, curious, sits up. She blinks. She waits, patient, for her eyes to adjust.

“Oh!” Alison hisses. “You’re awake.”

“Yes,” Helena says. Alison untangles herself from her husband and comes and sits next to Helena. Helena scoots over a little bit, to let Alison share the warm place, offers half of her pelt-blanket. They sit next to each other, close, like sisters.

“Did you need,” Helena says quietly.

“No,” Alison says. “I wanted to make sure you weren’t having nightmares.”

“Oh.” Helena considers. “Can you tell.”

“You – um,” Alison says. “Yes. I can tell.”

“Sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize,” Alison says softly. “You really don’t, Helena.”

Helena sits there, watching Donnie’s chest rise and fall in the dark. She might cry. She can feel the words pushing at her teeth, and she might cry. Instead she says them.

“They poured water on my face,” she says, “in the camp. It was like drowning. Very dark. I couldn’t breathe for a long time.”

“Oh, Helena,” Alison says, and she scoots closer so that her side is against Helena’s side. “Oh, sweetheart. I’m so sorry.”

“They put needles in my arm and they took blood from me,” Helena says, still staring across the dark hut, and telling this feels bad and the only thing that seems like it will make it less bad is to just keep telling. “I tried to run away but I fell down in the desert and I had to go back for Sarah and – Sarah shot me and it hurt and we don’t talk about it but it scarred and I think about it always and I don’t know if I deserved it or not and we don’t talk about our mother, _sestra_ Alison, we never talk about her and I know I did a bad thing but I can’t say sorry and—” (she sucks in a breath) “sometimes I dream about them, I can see their faces and they’re all so scared and what if my babies grow up like me and what if they don’t, what if they are so good and they look at me and know that I’m not good and – what if I hurt you or _sestra_ Cosima or Sarah, what if I forget and – I ate it, I ate the rat, I was so hungry and I ate it and I killed Henrik and I liked it and I still remember the blue room and what they took and what they put inside me and their faces and _sestra_ Alison I don’t think it will ever go away and Rudy said we were the same, what if we were, and—” she’s starting to slow down. Her breath is coming in whooping, jagged lurches. “And you say that you killed Beth but it was always supposed to be me. I knew her name, and where she lived. She shot Maggie and I should have shot her, right there. But I couldn’t. And then she was Sarah and I couldn’t. It wasn’t the pills, _sestra_ Alison. It was always supposed to be me.”

And there. She’s done. Her breath is like a knife, only it isn’t like a knife at all. It isn’t even a little bit like a knife – that’s what makes her start crying, right there in the dark. She knows what it’s like to have a knife in your throat. She’s done it to other people. She’s still breathing and that feels so very unfair.

Fingers in her hair and her head being slowly pushed down to Alison’s shoulder. Alison is combing fingers through her hair, very slowly, and Helena starts shuddering and can’t stop.

“I thought this was supposed to help,” she says. “I thought it was supposed to make you feel better. Why don’t I feel better.”

“It takes time,” Alison says. She opens her mouth and sucks in a quiet breath, but she doesn’t say anything else. It takes time. Helena wishes that it didn’t.

“I want to be good,” she says helplessly, “like you.”

“Helena,” Alison says in an equally helpless voice, “I want to be like _you_. Why would you want to be like me? I’m – a mess. I was awful to you! And you let me stay with you _anyways_ , and taught me to use a bow, and you – you killed the deer after I was so _stupid_ and you saved our lives. You’ve been looking out for us ever since you first came to stay with us, over and over again. You are – the bravest person I’ve ever met. And I’m just _me_.”

“You look after your family,” Helena says, because it’s very urgent that Alison know this. “You always have food for them, and hugs and kisses, and you know which sports Oscar and Gemma should do and you take them to the sports, always on-time, always with enough gas in the tank. When you were scared for them you sent them away. I couldn’t send my babies away, not ever. I would be too scared. You know – how to dress, and when to say please-and-thank-yous and how to be a person. A real person. I want to be a real person too.”

“You are,” Alison says, and she rests her head on top of Helena’s. Helena closes her eyes and for a moment is only the places where her skin is pressed to Alison’s. Then she opens her eyes, and the world comes back.

“Donnie said that you wanted to be like me,” she says thoughtfully, “but I did not believe.”

“Never tell him he was right,” Alison says back. “He’ll hold it over my head for _weeks_.”

“Really?”

“He does that,” Alison says, and her voice is warm and wry and fond. “He beat me at Scrabble _once_ and didn’t let it go for a month! Called himself the Scrabble king. He won with the word _sharp_ and he’d work it into every gosh-darn conversation he could think of. Oh, honey, that’s a _sharp_ look you’ve got there, you’re a really _sharp_ dresser…” She lets out another one of those little shameful laughs. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this story. It’s silly.”

“No, keep going,” Helena says. “How did you make him stop.”

Across the hut Donnie lets out a very loud snore, like he’s trying to argue, and she and Alison start giggling at the same time. It’s not that funny but they’re laughing anyways, harder and harder, until Helena is crying from laughter and burying her face in Alison’s shoulder to keep from snorting loud enough to wake Donnie up.

“Oh,” Alison gasps, “oh heavens, oh dear, oh – oh no.”

Helena can feel her laugh building, the sort of laugh that wakes up sleeping husbands. “Shh,” she hisses, and that just makes her laugh harder.

Alison claps her hand over Helena’s mouth. Helena licks it. That’s it, the breaking point: Alison starts _cackling_ and Donnie lurches upright, looking around blindly in the dark.

Helena bursts into guffaws and promptly falls backwards. She’s wheezing.

“Wha’?” Donnie asks, blinking at them. “Whass – _happening?_ ”

There’s a _whumph_ as Alison falls backwards, on the pelt next to Helena, and Helena looks over and meets her eyes; they’re scrunched up in the same way hers are, tearing up the same way hers are. Alison’s grin like her grin. Helena’s grin like Alison’s grin, both of them lying here and laughing because they’re _here_ and they can and right now it seems like laughing and being happy is the hardest and most beautiful thing and the best part is she thinks that Alison knows.

“It’s good,” she says to Alison, through the hiccups of her laughter.

“It is,” Alison says. “It really – really is.” Then her eyes close as she keeps laughing, giggles sputtering slower now but showing no signs of stopping.

Helena rolls over onto her side – with effort – and reaches out and takes Alison’s hand. Alison’s eyes open. She smiles at Helena, and folds their fingers together, and squeezes. It doesn’t feel like home, not yet, but that’s alright; all Helena has to do is hold on, and she knows it’ll feel like home eventually.

So she does. She holds on tight, and closes her eyes, and waits to come home.

**Author's Note:**

> And it's a long way forward, so trust in me  
> I'll give them shelter, like you've done for me  
> And I know, I'm not alone, you'll be watching over us  
> Until you're gone  
> \--"Shelter," Porter Robinson and Madeon
> 
> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed! :)


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